{"id":559737,"date":"2026-07-20T22:42:11","date_gmt":"2026-07-20T22:42:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/559737\/"},"modified":"2026-07-20T22:42:11","modified_gmt":"2026-07-20T22:42:11","slug":"richard-simcock-emergency-diagnosis-remains-a-major-challenge-in-ovarian-cancer-care","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/559737\/","title":{"rendered":"Richard Simcock: Emergency Diagnosis Remains a Major Challenge in Ovarian Cancer Care"},"content":{"rendered":"

Richard Simcock, Chief Medical Officer at Macmillan Cancer Support, shared on LinkedIn<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cHaving cancer diagnosed following an emergency admission is bad. It is associated with late stage, poorer survival and poor experience<\/p>\n

The Northern Ireland 2022-2032 Cancer Plan highlights
the significant survival differences seen by route to diagnosis, with three-year survival highest for screen-detected cancers at 97% compared to three-year survival of 21% for those presenting as an emergency.<\/p>\n

Georgia Zachou and the team at NATCAN have this month published useful data in BMJ Oncology to understand the extent of the problem in England with respect to Ovarian Cancer.<\/p>\n

The data looks at 2017-2021 registry figures and assesses characteristics of those people diagnosed with an ovarian cancer within 28 days of an emergency admission. The figure was shockingly high with 2 in 5 women (40.3 %) of the 28204 included women diagnosed after emergency attendance. It is the broadest population based study of this problem yet published, and it starkly illustrates variations in care.<\/p>\n

Emergency admission was seen more commonly:<\/p>\n

-In severely frail people (68.6% of those with worst SCARF frailty score \u00a0compared to 29.2% of those with lowest score)
\nIn people with comorbidities (67.6% in people with 3 or more recorded comorbidities compared to 34.8% in those with none)
\nIn those from the most deprived quintiles of neighbourhoods (44.2% compared to 37.8% in the least deprived)<\/p>\n

There were also statistically significant differences showing higher rates in younger women (42.7% of the 490 people aged 18-29 diagnosed as emergencies) and in older people (54.9% of the 5379 people aged over 80). There were no observed differences by ethnicity.<\/p>\n

Ovarian cancer is notoriously difficult to diagnose; presenting symptoms can mimic many benign conditions and there is no proven early screening pathway.
Macmillan Cancer Support have useful information and videos<\/a> on symptoms.<\/p>\n

These data points also do not tell us about any primary care contacts these women may have had. What the data powerfully shows is a need for increased and concerted effort on improving pathways but provide some focus on which patient groups may most benefit from intervention.<\/p>\n

The NHS England Cancer Plan has an ambition to diagnose 75% of cancers at Stage 1 or 2 by 2035. In this study the number of ovarian cancer diagnosed at Stage 1 and 2 was 29.6% and only 13.7% in those diagnosed as an emergency.<\/p>\n

Scotland\u2019s 10-year Cancer Strategy 2023-2033 \u00a0puts numbers on an ambition to reduce late-stage cancer diagnoses (Stages 3 and 4) from 42% to 24%.<\/p>\n

Too many people are being diagnosed late and these data clearly show that deprivation, comorbidity and age all reduce the chance of this disease being caught at a more treatable stage. There is much work to do here.\u201d<\/p>\n

Title: Ovarian cancer diagnosis within 28 days after an emergency admission to hospital: national population-based study of patient risk factors and cancer characteristics using routinely collected data in England<\/p>\n

Authors: Georgia Zachou, Rui Wu, Andrew Hutchings, Jan van der Meulen, Ipek Gurol-Urganci, Agnieszka Michael, Sudha Sundar<\/p>\n

Read the full article<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Richard<\/p>\n

Other articles about Ovarian Cancer<\/a> on OncoDaily.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Richard Simcock, Chief Medical Officer at Macmillan Cancer Support, shared on LinkedIn: \u201cHaving cancer diagnosed following an emergency…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":559738,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[103,61,60],"class_list":["post-559737","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-health","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559737","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=559737"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559737\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/559738"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=559737"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=559737"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=559737"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}